Significant Achievements with The Integrated ALM Platform

The process of software development can only be successful if you have a flexible, collaborative and integrated application lifecycle management platform. You will have to constantly make changes in the process to develop an optimum product and also trace the entire cycle to the original specifications. However these changes must not affect your costs. You must also ensure that all the developers are on the same page irrespective of their geographical locations so that unexpected and costly expenses can be avoided due to any conflicting executions, and a fulfilling requirements management process is carried out.

An integrated ALM solution provides a single repository for a streamlined and centralized management process that provides highly efficient performances. It ensures the deployment of a smooth and effective workflow that facilitates reviews and escalations. The solution provides excellent capabilities for attaching documents for the purpose of global reviewing and document approvals. It provides you with dashboards for real-time reports and provides you opportunities for making critical and insightful decisions.

Integrated ALM tools helps in the deployment of best practices, improves the quality of the processes, enhances productivity and ensures faster time-to-market which increases the customer satisfaction levels. All changes can be easily incorporated without causing any disruptions in the operations and without affecting the costs. The ALM tools facilitate Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration or OSLC integration that provides assistance in integrating data through simple and live linking of artifacts.

You can browse the Requirements in RequisitePro, test cases in the Quality Center, work items in TFS, build results in Hudson and detect defects in Jira from the OSLC tool. You can also link all the artifacts present within different tools as a requirement in RRC, change the items in RTC and test cases in RQM. The tool provides you a preview of the artifacts with live data sourced from the main tool. You can create new artifacts, check the latest status and updates. You can update the artifacts and easily collaborate with the stakeholders.

The integrated ALM platform also provides sharepoint integration services for the tracking and processing of the various artifacts stored and shared in sharepoint, thereby encouraging collaboration and increasing the visibility of artifacts maintained in sharepoint by others. The integrated ALM solution provides you with commendable support that fulfills the requirements in the software development process with proficiency and diligence. It creates opportunities that enhance your revenue earning potentials, and helps you deliver with brilliance.

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Enterprise service bus

Software as a Service SaaS

Developments in IT Service Desk Management

Over the past few years, service desks were only assigned to respond and record to user issues that took place in the environment. Today service desk analysts have become more proficient in handling this task. At the same time, the role and scope of the IT service desk has expanded in order to assist a wide range of IT management practices and IT companies need to match their solution to these evolved needs. The modern day service desk operates at the front office of IT and orchestrator of many IT service management activities that are included in ITIL best practices library. The process sections of problem and incident management, configuration management, change management, release management and others need to orchestrated and connected to benefit the service consumer.

The IT Service Desk is changing

Today the responsibilities of the ITSM tools are changing as well as expanding. The primary responsibility is to improve the consumer satisfaction. This is done by functioning as the single contact point for all the IT customers to maximize the service accessibility, restore services whenever possible and offers business systems assistance. The increased pressure on IT for reducing expenses has placed the service desk front and center as an enterprise that can set up processes that many other enterprises, in and out of IT can utilize. The service desk team therefore becomes the owner and custodian of IT services offered to the line of business.

Today eminent service providers of ALM integration have come up with innovative IT service management tools that cater to the changing IT service desk scenario. Some of the selected features include:-

* Numerous service requests can be associated to an incident and in such a case, the closure of these requests depends strictly on the closure of linked incidents.

* The IT help desk software enables various helpdesk procedures and enables the deployment of various workflows even within a single helpdesk interface

* There is a multi-user conditional resolution capacity that helps numerous helpdesk people to play various roles for various conditions

* Innovative IT help desk software solutions effortlessly integrates the helpdesk and all other constituents of IT service management tools for instance problem management, change management, release management and incident management.

Numerous itsm service desks today have realized the gap that lies between their present state and an optimal state concerning expenses, user feedback, staffing, scalability and opportunity. Every organization must assess their service desk state to assess how well they have been leveraging the process, people and the technologies available today. Numerous service desk vendors have most of the functionalities today. Hence, it is essential too assess the IT service management offerings from a service provider prior to joining hands with it.

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Subversion integration

Requirements traceability matrix
 

Reaping in the benefits of OSLC integration

OSLC also known as Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration has been the latest buzzword in the software development landscape. However, chances are there that even if you have not heard of it, you might be operating any software that depends on it. To explain in simple terms, OSLC is both a community of software developers as well as an organization that works towards standardizing the manner in which that software lifecycle tools can share the data and set up specifications explaining the way the data is actually shared. Perhaps the most prominent use of OSLC integration till date has been the IBM Rational Jazz Platform and the allied set of products. These Jazz products use OSLC specifications for incorporating with each other to provide complete Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) solutions. 

Owing to the fact that OSLC specifications are accessible under the Creative Commons Attribution License, it is not just Jazz based products that have been using OSLC to solve integration concerns. Generally, enterprises make use of a multiple tools from various vendors and open source providers to support and manage individual phases of application development lifecycle or SDLC.

Benefits of OSLC integration

Top notch companies specializing in ALM integration tools have come up with the latest OSLC integration solution.  

They offer the following benefits:-

* Enables the users to browse from the requirement list, work items, test cases,  set up results and detects from the OSLC consumer tool, for instance IBM RTC

* Artifacts contained are linked to various tools in the context of test case, requirement and changed item. The users are able to get a preview of the artifact with live data the generates from the source tool

* Consumers are able to create new artifacts

* As the artifacts are being worked upon by multiple shareholders, users of OSLC consumer tools can follow the status updates, comments and other activities

* Consumers can update artifacts and collaborate with other stakeholders

Today any OSLC enabled end user tools, for instance IBM RTC and RRC have the capacity to connect various ALM tools including Microsoft TFS, HP Quality Center, Atlassian Jira and SharePoint with the help of OSLC linking. Any ALM artifact in IBM RTC can have a live link to any artifact in Microsoft TFS. Enterprises providing OSLC integration are today enabling OSLC specification for change management, quality management and even requirements management software.

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Perforce Integration

Subversion integration

Importance of OSLC Tools Integration

Software development process or software development lifecycle (SDLC) is a comprehensive framework that describes the various phases and the various activities that need to be performed at each phase of software development. It is a complicated process where the software development team has to go through various stages namely

* Initiation

* System Concept Development and Planning

* Requirements analysis

* Design

* Development

* Testing

* Implementation

* Maintenance

* Disposition

However, blind adherence to the various development stages will not guarantee success. The software development process must involve careful planning, meticulous execution, good communication and prompt reaction. Only then, the software development team can develop software that conforms to customer requirements.

The different stakeholders in the software development process namely requirements analysts, architects, developers, coders, testers, managers and operations personnel require various tools to manage and support the different phases of the software development process. The different tools required by the software development team include requirements management tools, test management tools, issues management tools, risk management tools, release management tools, and project management tools. Let us look at the role of some of these tools in software development process.

Team Foundation Server (TFS)

TFS is a tool that helps the development team in source control, data collection, reporting and project tracking. TFS integration platform facilitates integration between TFS and external systems like bug-tracking systems. This platform helps build tools that move data unidirectionally into TFS, and tools that manage data bidirectionally.

Visual Studio

An integrated development environment, Visual Studio includes a code editor, debugger, forms designer, web designer, class designer, data designer, and mapping designer. Since it allows plug-ins, compilers, editors and debuggers can enhance its functionalities at almost every level.

JIRA

JIRA is an issue-tracking tool that helps in issue tracking, bug tracking and project management.

Eclipse

An integrated development environment, Eclipse helps in developing applications in Java and with the help of various plug-ins, other programming languages such as C, C++, COBOL, Perl, PHP, Python, R, Ruby, Groovy, Scheme and so on.

SharePoint

A web application platform, it helps companies and organizations in managing their web requirements. As it is heavily integrated with the Office suite of tools, even non-experts can use this multipurpose web tool and its functions.

These are best of breed tools but these are siloed point function tools as well. Hence, though these tools provide great assistance to the various stakeholders, the lack of effective collaboration and synchronization between these tools affects team collaboration and communication very badly. Until recently, almost all companies faced such a problem but the development of Open Service for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) initiative has succeeded in putting an end to this situation through effortless integration. Thanks to OSLC integration, the various stakeholders now have a clear picture regarding the overall application development activities and status.

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 Requirements traceability matrix

Eclipse integration

Understanding OSLC Integration and its benefits

Software development life cycle (SDLC) or application development lifecycle involves different stages and phases such as initiation, system concept development, planning, requirements analysis, design, development, integration, testing, implementation, maintenance and disposition. For managing and supporting these phases, companies and organizations use variety of tools (that can be open source, purchased or proprietary) from multiple vendors and open source providers. The tools that include IBM RequisitePro, ClearQuest, ClearCase, Enterprise Architect, HP Quality Center, Microsoft TFS, SharePoint, Visual Studio, Eclipse IDE, Atlassian Jira, Perforce, CA Clarity, Subversion and Hudson are the best of breed tools. However, these tools are siloed point function tools, which leave the different stakeholders such as business analysts, architects, developers, testers and managers with no idea regarding the overall application development activities and status.

Almost all companies and organizations have an application development environment that is fragile and this is because of the lack of effective collaboration and synchronization between the different practitioner tools. And the result of such a fragile environment is limited traceability, wasted effort and time, unstable integrations, lower productivity, poor quality and unsatisfactory software delivery. This led to the development of Open Service for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) initiative to facilitate effortless integration between disparate tools. OSLC is divided into different workgroups namely Quality Management, Requirements Management, Software Configuration management, Change Management, Build Automation and so on.

OSLC was formalized in 2009 and the first workgroup to be formed was the Change management work group. It involved individuals from IBM, Accenture, Eclipse Mylyn/Tasktop and so on. Today there are many such workgroups formed around other lifecycle stages and includes individuals from more than 30 different organizations including Siemens, Tieto, Oracle, General Motors, and Northrop Grumman.

Thanks to OSLC integration, life has become easier for software and product developers and tool vendors as Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) has become less daunting and complex. By standardizing the way in which the lifecycle tools can share data, OSLC integration has made it possible for the various high breed disparate software lifecycle tools to collaborate easily.

The following are some of the benefits of OSLC integration.

* Implement leaner and more agile processes

* Reduce costs

* Companies can increase the value they produce

* Improve business results

* Facilitate enhanced traceability across artifacts and every step in a process chain

* Save considerable time and effort

* Facilitate easy and effortless integration

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Software as a Service SaaS

ITSM Software